Religion Around Shakespeare

Hardcover | November 4, 2013

For years scholars and others have been trying to out Shakespeare as an ardent Calvinist, a crypto-Catholic, a Puritan-baiter, a secularist, or a devotee of some hybrid faith. In Religion Around Shakespeare, Peter Kaufman sets aside such speculation in favor of considering the historical and religious context surrounding his work. Employing extensive archival research, he aims to assist literary historians who probe the religious discourses, characters, and events that seem to have found places in Shakespeare’s plays and to aid general readers or playgoers developing an interest in the plays’ and playwright’s religious contexts: Catholic, conformist, and reformist. Kaufman argues that sermons preached around Shakespeare and conflicts that left their marks on literature, law, municipal chronicles, and vestry minutes enlivened the world in which (and with which) he worked and can enrich our understanding of the playwright and his plays.

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For years scholars and others have been trying to out Shakespeare as an ardent Calvinist, a crypto-Catholic, a Puritan-baiter, a secularist, or a devotee of some hybrid faith. In Religion Around Shakespeare, Peter Kaufman sets aside such speculation in favor of considering the historical and religious context surrounding his work. Empl...

Peter Iver Kaufman is Modlin Professor at the University of Richmond and Professor Emeritus, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Religion Around

2 Around Shakespeare

Interlude

3 Religious Authority

4 Religious Personality

5 Religious Community

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

“Kaufman’s book is successful in its aims, and they are important ones; by it, not only will Shakespeare’s culture become more comprehensible for general readers, but also Shakespeare scholars and those studying other aspects of Renaissance English life will come away with a sharper, more accurate conception of the period’s maelstrom of religious influences and, I cannot but think, with a healthy reluctance to indulge in oversimplification about it. . . . I heartily recommend this book to specialists and nonspecialists alike.”—John E. Curran Jr., Renaissance Quarterly